Kudos to Krista Kafer for her excellent commentary regarding the backers of Amendment 66 and how they fail to make a case for yet another massive tax increase on already overburdened taxpayers (nearly a billion dollars for underfunded schools). When they say, “It’s for the children,” they don’t mention it’s also for teachers unions and education bureaucracies. Thousands of taxpayers are having to stretch their money and spend it carefully because their paychecks and incomes are shrinking. Is it unreasonable to expect as much from the public education establishment?

Dale C. Behse, Denver

This letter was published in the Sept. 27 edition.

The conversation around Amendment 66 is critical to our state’s future, and voters deserve a serious debate on the matter. Unfortunately, Krista Kafer’s column, in which she accused proponents of the measure of being “less than factual,” included its own cherry-picked data.

Kafer cited a figure on per pupil spending from a National Education Association report (“Colorado ranks 26th in the nation in education spending”), but failed to mention that her number was not just state spending. It included money that local districts pitch in, a process that leaves plenty of poorer areas behind. The column also failed to mention that in the same analysis, Colorado is 49th in state tax revenue as a percentage of income.

Amendment 66 is asking voters for a serious commitment to our children. We must decide how much we should spend on what we value, and that decision needs to be based on facts. Our children deserve no less.

Corey Kesler, Centennial

This letter was published in the Sept. 27 edition.

Amendment 66 guarantees Colorado voters only two things: a $950 million tax increase and less control over how to spend those tax dollars. What it does not (and cannot) guarantee is higher student achievement.

Krista Kafer points out that increased funding does not automatically result in increased achievement. Her point is well-founded. She mentions Eric Hanushek, a well-known expert on the issue, but he is only one of many researchers whose work shows no significant correlation between greater educational funding and student improvement.

Average per-pupil spending in the U.S. has more than doubled since the 1970s, while overall achievement has remained flat. In my eight years of teaching high school humanities and English as a second language in Thornton, I found that our school’s quality was not determined by its physical capital, but rather its human capital. The strength of the staff is what caused our students to perform better academically, not our budget.

Eamon Leonard, Wheat Ridge

This letter was published in the Sept. 27 edition.

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I think it was the late US Senator Everett Dirksen who, in the 1960s, after hearing one too many mind-numbing fiscal discussions concerning some federal agency’s budget requests, observed, “a billion here, and a billion there, and now we’re talking real money!”
This billion dollars or so that two of the letter writers object to as allegedly being raised and spent by Amendment 66: Over what period of time does the Amendment say it will be raised and spent? Per year, per decade, over 30 years? How long?
Is there a website that concisely explains what Amendment 66 proposes without (I can dream, can’t I) engaging in heated pro or con rhetoric?
I want to see neither “It’s for the children, and if you vote ‘no’, you want them barefoot and ignorant!” nor “It’s a totalitarian plot to brainwash our kids, and reduce the populace to indentured servitude to the government!” I’ll leave that to the Behses, Keslers, and Leonards of the state, along with the endless political ads we’re about to be subject to.

Hankalish

Kudos!

peterpi

I may well have to wait for the so-called “blue book”, sent out before each election, to see a reasoned explanation of the Amendment, and the pros and cons.

I’d rather

The original guest commentary said that the spending would increase by $950 million per year.

peterpi

Thank you. I appreciate the info.
Addendum:
Many rural school districts have huge infrastructure needs with regard to their schools — buildings badly in need of repair or replacement, heating systems in need of a major overhaul, etc. — that can’t be met, simply because the population base can’t support the necessary local taxation required to fix it all.
But, call me skeptical, I bet the funding in Amendment 66 favors the big school districts, which, if they really wanted to, could find a way to finance their needs.
That’s why I want to see objective nonpartisan information of what this Amendment does, what taxes it increases, where the money would go, etc.
It’ll also make a difference to me if it’s a state constitutional amendment or a statutory amendment. I’m tired of voters putting constitutional amendments in place that then need an act of God to fix or modify if changes are needed.

Tbone

Oh no! Teachers might get paid! Everybody run and hide! The apocalypse!!!

peterpi

They want the money to go straight into smarter kids without trivialities like teachers, administrators, other staff, buildings, educational materials, HVAC, school buses, other supplies, energy costs, etc.

thor

Over-statement again, eh, pete. All the things you listed, schools have. But you failed to list the over-promised pensions that some of the amendment 66 money will go to.

peterpi

“Over-promised pensions”, meaning the teachers expect one.

I think a number of private companies over-promised on pensions. Oh, I forget: They dumped the pensions, with no penalties for themselves. Left pensioners holding an empty bag. That must have done wonders for their profit margin.
Some of those dumped pensions got unloaded on the government, increasing government costs. Allowing conservatives to blast bloated government, and ignore the companies who dumped them.

thor

Always comparing public to private and claiming that if private companies can do it its alright for public to do it. Or vica versa. No one is saying to drop pensions, but they NEED TO BECOME DEFINED CONTRIBUTIONS. Why you and others hold on to defined benefits is beyond me. And people like you just want to defend liberal decisions, even when they are wrong for the economy. Its like defending President Obama’s policies come hell or high water when you know they have weakened the nation.

peterpi

You defend conservative decisions, but wonder why liberals defend liberal decisions.
You claim to understand different people holding different views, but smugly claim only your own as valid.
No, thor, nobody “NEEDs to [have their pension plan] become defined contributions”.
Everyone used to have defined benefits. It lets the worker know what he or she will receive upon retiring.
But your side loves defined contributions. It limits a company’s costs, allows a company to change it at will, improves profits, and leaves the worker contemplating retiring at the mercy of the markets.
Then there’s companies like Enron, where the execs bailed, froze the workers’ stock holdings for a month, and left the workers with lovely wallpaper rectangles (formerly called shares of stock) to decorate their homes with.
People used to work for a company for decades, knowing that the company would reward their loyalty. Now, all companies want to do is shove old workers out the door. Vincent Carroll sneeringly calls pensions “legacy costs”, to be liquidated as fast as possible. I bet he whistles a different tune when he turns 65.

thor

Gotta quit comparing public to private. Its PERA that is in trouble for over-promising, not Coors or IBM or any number of companies in CO. The best way to help PERA is to go to defined contributions. But your stubborn liberal ideals prevent you from seeing that. Along with the typical liberal economic ignorance and utopian view of how things are. Throw in liberal beholding to unions and you are stuck with your views.

peterpi

Projection time, I see.

thor

Its “projector” not projection. But schools don’t use those much, anymore.

peterpi

You know what I meant.

thor

No sense of humor.

MD

Fund managers love defined contribution plans; they profit regardless of how well the funds perform.

Now the right also wants to privatize Social Security, a move welcomed by financial institutions that stand to profit while placing decades of worker contributions at risk.

thor

No reason they will be at any more risk then in the “locked box.”

thor

Teachers do get paid. The get paid well compared to many factions of society. Do they get paid as well as professional athletes? No. But I bet that you don’t, either. Tyr rereading the last letter and you may learn something.

tomfromthenews

In my mind, as a retiree receiving those EVIL PERA benefits, it’s not so much about paying teachers more, but paying MORE TEACHERS. When you get the student-teacher ratio down, individual attention and real learning goes up. It’s just common sense, and it does cost more.

guest

A question: If you were a teacher (a retiree receiving PERA benefits), why do you call yourself tomfromthenews?

tomfromthenews

It’s a long story. Why would you possibly care?

Tbone

Busted!

peterpi

RMN or “the News” probably doesn’t mean anything to guest

guest

Just curious.

thor

edgy, huh?

holyreality

If this actually helped the teachers, I would be behind it.

Unfortunately teachers are the tools at the bottom of the educational heirarchy.

Administrators who “earn” six figure salaries are the first pigs at the trough. Craven schoolbook publishers who produce all the material nationwide based on Texas’ backwards standards follow.

Teachers who implement common core, a creativity killing, standardized test emphasizing curriculum face a choice between abandoning a career for personal integrity or spoon feeding it to the nation’s future.

When there is a problem, DON’T fix it, throw money at it.

Dano2

We never learn anything. Why don’t people looking to educate kids have a budget to inform Coloradans what the bill is about? Why must the media be saturated with dishonest messages spread farther by gullibles like poor Mr Behse and shills making good pay for a few think-tanks?

Best,

D

guest

Translation: We shouldn’t have all that right wing propaganda out there. Propaganda is the government’s job.

Dano2

Thank you for having nothing but dishonest interpretations.

Exactly what we expect from you.

Best,

D

guest

So how did I misinterpret what you said? Oh, I didn’t, but you having no comeback but to simply lie about my posting. Exactly what I expect from you.

MS

Ad hominem is the response one gives you when they have no argument—in effect they have surrendered the argument.

MD

Yet another tax increase that won’t affect students’ achievements. It’s time to completely reform our public educational systems, modeling our systems on those with proven track records of success in our country as well as other countries in the developed world — Finland for example. We’re currently settling for average, placing 17th in the developed world when there are many examples of best practices to emulate.

There are many highly-educated people, who would welcome the opportunity to help with the transition, people with real-world experience and proven talents who have either lost their jobs or retired.

Dano2

Yet another tax increase that won’t affect students’ achievements

Wowie! you kin see into the fyoocher!!!!111one!

Tell me, pal, buddy, friend o’mine: since you can see into the fyoocher, what is the powerball winning combination for Saturday?

Best,

D

MS

I’ve seen the past—the same story again and again.

Too much truth for ya?

MD

Thank you, MS, this is exactly my point. Simply throwing more money at a broken system hasn’t worked.

So, D, what do you have against a new approach, such as adopting the best practices of schools with track records of success? Nothing mystical about proven success, and genuine reform would warrant the additional funding in my opinion.

And why the sarcasm in response to other people expressing their ideas? Admittedly, it’s easy to provide negative criticism, and much more difficult to come up with constructive ideas.

Best back at you.

MS

Thanks for your support. There is one area I would like to clarify. We don’t need more money—there is already too much spent on education, it’s simply wasted on non-essential matters and heavy bureaucracy. Rather than increase taxes, we need to reprogram the money, putting it where it matters: in the actual education of students. The students’ parents are best equipped to make the choices about what works.

The state should focus on setting up an independent body, that deliberately does not permit people in the education system itself from participating, to determine the best ways to measure the progress (or lack thereof) for schools. To be clear, we should have objective metrics for every program passed, metrics not subject to incestuous manipulation and gaming. That means it needs to be run by the parents, not the teachers, but may engage independent testing companies to find the best way to measure effectiveness. These scores should be published and bad schools driven out of business.

All of this should cost much much less than the existing school system. There is no reason why education should have escalated so much faster in price than everything else—it even beat health care.

IMO the state (or political entities) should not run schools and teachers should not be employees of the government, but of people who run the schools. In the end I think good teachers will make more money. bad teachers will be encouraged to find a new career and cost will go down as quality goes up. And, the state will not be stuck with having to manage so many employees and their pensions and so forth.

By the way, I used to receive people who had gone through the school systems and I know what to look for in a candidate coming out of a masters or PhD program and also that they still need more training. The best were admitted to my team. There are much better approaches to learning and turning information into knowledge—useful knowledge—but they require the freedom to break with traditional methods. I’m not advocating a particular one, but innovation at the lowest level (not top down from politicians and their cronies) is where the good ideas emerge.

MD

On revisiting my comments, MS, I believe you’re correct on the need to re-direct taxpayer funds as well as weed out cases of fraud and abuse.
I volunteer tutored in low income schools, and was amazed at how little I felt students were actually learning. I boned up on a few of the creative techniques used to get ideas across to students, and the new approaches actually worked on students who showed little or no interest in learning.
I also had a problem with standardized testing, which visibly discouraged the students who didn’t do well. It also unfairly reflected on teachers’ abilities, which led me to conclude. I that teachers should be judged on individual student’s progress throughout the year, not simply on standardized test scores.

MS

I agree that just standardized test scores are not a panacea for measuring progress. I am sure we can find ways to gauge how well the schools or any particular system works, but we can’t overlook test scores, simply because they are not a sufficient total measure would be a mistake.

I’ve seen some applied techniques work well when trying to educate some of my own charges—I treated young scientists and engineers I took on as my responsibility as well. Sometimes if people simply cannot see where the theory is heading (why am I learning this?) they can disconnect as well. We need both pure and applied learning techniques and then there will be others. That’s the beauty of best practices—thousands of people working to get better and innovation driving success with the things that actually work being adopted. I am for empowering teachers, not denigrating them. Its the system and the incentives that don’t work and even if we increased funding by 1000%, expecting a different outcome without real change is insane.

Dano2

There’s no truth to be too much, but thanks!

Best,

D

guest

“You know they don’t know what they are talking about when they bring up a treasured totem.” =Hand waving.

Liberals like you live in a perpetual state of cognitive dissonance. Every time some liberal thinks they have a genius idea to solve the problem (meaning lets tax everyone to death and throw more money at the problem!) they act like it’s never been done before. Well it has been done before. More times than you’ll ever acknowledge. And it NEVER works.

MS

There is absolutely no reason to raise the income tax and even less to start the despicable California-like progressivism in taxing.

Nationally, the rate of inflation for education has been rising at something like 5-times the broad rate of inflation, but with zero—yes zero results. test scores have NOT risen.
The real issue is, as always, a lack of real competition in this industry and a bloated monopoly budget that encourages less quality for more money.

If you want to really improve things for the kids, to do something that makes a real difference, then we need to move away from monopolies, away from government-run institutions and provide funding on a per pupil basis with the choice of schools being left to the parents, be it public, private, and yes even parochial.

Things don’t get better and more cost effective when the only solution is to double down every few years and throw money at a problem. The model is broken. More money isn’t the answer, but better run schools are.

Don’t let the progressive destroy this state, just as they have done in California, where the major cities are searching for ways to declare bankruptcy.

Dano2

the despicable California-like progressivism in taxing.

You know they don’t know what they are talking about when they bring up a treasured totem.

Best,

D

MS

California is the poster child for dysfunctional thinking on the misuse of government.

“Oh, we don’t want any power plants here in our state. . . . why does electric power cost so much?”

Dano2

The treasured totems keep coming!!!

Best,

D

Dave52

As a parent of current public school students, watching their budget cut every year for the past decade, seeing the schools drop languages, art, music and theatre, seeing them curtail the number of advanced classes, and watching a 25% annual turnover of teachers because the pay is so low they leave as soon as they can, I’d say we’ve tried the “starve the system” approach long enough. Oh, and now? With the recession and the collapse of housing values? Even less money from property taxes.

tomfromthenews

Yep. And STILL you’ll hear the public school haters scream, “Make ’em do more with less like WE do!” as if educating our children were a minor matter.

tomfromthenews

“The strength of the staff is what caused our students to perform better academically, not our budget.”

Mr. Leonard, as a fellow retiree, I couldn’t agree more. And in order to increase that strength, more teachers should be hired (the single most costly part of any school budget) to decrease the student-teacher ratio.

It just costs more.

guest

We’ve been doing that for 30 years and yet the performance of the students hasn’t improved. What student/teacher ratio do you think would make a difference that we could see and measure?

tomfromthenews

No, guest, I promise you we have not been decreasing student-teacher ratios! We have been increasing them! Budgets were cut and bond/mill levy initiatives were defeated (in Jeffco and most other districts) for a solid decade. The effectiveness difference by going from even 27-to-1 to 23-to-1 is amazing and relatively modest. Bring that down to 20-to-1 and I promise you’ll see significant improvement. Of course, that means hiring more teachers.

As of 2012 (when I retired), we were still at between 28 and 33 to 1 in most of our high school’s English classes where I taught. Even without modern distractions like attention-killing social media, that’s an incredible obstacle to address.

peterpi

They’ll come up with any excuse to not pay taxes, and then wonder why the schoolhouse roof leaks, and the heating system fails whenever it gets below 50 degrees outside.
But they ascribe it to waste and inefficiency.
Virtually every human enterprise requires administration of some form. If a company is larger than mom-and-pop, it’ll have secretaries, office managers, the digital equivalent of file clerks, etc., and nobody thinks twice about it.
But, woe and damnation to the school that has assistant principals, clerks that answer the phones, etc.

guest

Anything to back up that assertion?

guest

Not according to U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics. (2012).

Pupil/Teacher Ratio

For public schools, the number of pupils per FTE teacher—that is, the pupil/teacher ratio—declined from 22.3 in 1970 to 17.9 in 1985. After 1985, the public school pupil/teacher ratio continued to decline, reaching 17.2 in 1989. After a period of relative stability during the late 1980s through the mid-1990s, the ratio declined from 17.3 in 1995 to 16.0 in 2000. Decreases have continued since then, and the public school pupil/teacher ratio was 15.4 in 2009. By comparison, the pupil/teacher ratio for private schools was estimated at 12.5 in 2009. The average class size in 2007–08 was 20.0 pupils for public elementary schools and 23.4 pupils for public secondary schools.

ncesDOTedDOTgov

/fastfacts/display.asp?id=28

tomfromthenews

This is incredibly deceptive BS.

Some classes, like electives, have smaller enrollments and will skew the “public school class size” numbers down. But the class sizes in subjects that the naysayers are always hollering about (English, math, science, social studies), the classes all students are required to take and that most affect standardized test scores and which are compared to those of other countries, are much higher. My final two 10th grade English classes, in a very respectable suburban Denver area public high school, were 27 and 26 students all year. And mine were far from the largest classes. In all my 28 years of teaching in Colorado’s largest district, I don’t remember ever having a “regular” English class of fewer than 20 and that was only once or twice. Mid-20s to 30 is much more the real-world norm. I don’t care what your “fast facts” site says.

And of course private schools have a much lower ratio: they can admit or deny anyone they want, based not only on ability to pay the tuition but on academic performance, just so that their test scores don’t go down. Kids in private schools, by and large, come in the door much more equipped and ready to perform academically, from homes where education is valued and whose relative affluence comes from that education. Bottom line: private schools don’t have to work very hard to show superior results.

With more teachers in the building, public schools can teach “closer to the student” and achieve greater results. But it isn’t “free” as some would believe. You have to pay for it. Just ask the parent of any private school kid.

guest

Tommy, I guess facts aren’t your forte. It gave average student/teacher ratios as well as average class size. Now everyone knows that average numbers come from series of numbers some of which are higher and some of which are lower.

But I especially liked your “I don’t care what your “fast facts” site says. It isn’t my fast facts. Its the Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics. (2012). I think this site has more credibility than the comments of a retired teacher on the Denver Post Letters to the Editor blog. And I did notice you taught English and not statistics.

tomfromthenews

I taught in classrooms of 25-30 students for 28 years and never saw a reduction in class size. This is simple, observed fact. I don’t need to teach statistics to know how many kids were in my classes. No teacher in my English department had “regular” English classes (9th Grade English, 10th Grade English, etc.) with smaller sizes, either. These are day-in, day-out observable facts from my life. I know it is true, and I know class sizes have not been getting smaller. I don’t know where the DOE was looking at class size, but it wasn’t in Jeffco high schools during the past 30 years.

I think my decades-long, daily observation and work with students is epistemologically superior to the oversimplified “statistics” you cite. Have you, yourself, witnessed in person a shrinking of teacher-student ratios? I HAVE witnessed the opposite, and I DO KNOW that if class sizes, in the real world, came down, teachers would be able to do more, as is the case in privately funded schools.

DW

Perhaps the point here is that, while those may be accurate facts on a national level, Colorado spends far less per student than the national average. As a result our class sizes here are much larger, on average.

MS

I suspect that, like universities where the costs have escalated at 5-times the rate of inflation, the staff hired are not always teaching or even teachers, and I wonder if the ratios are skewed by dividing the number of students by the number of staff (teaching or not).

The real issue is who spend money more effectively, a state run institution or a private school? How much bang for the buck do we get?

The question is how much of the money actually goes into teaching and how much into bloat and non-essential things? Look at the recent California debacle where they spent 45 million on technology that was poorly thought out in a program that is being abandoned. Private entities cannot afford such waste, but when you’re spending someone else’s money, who cares?

My private high school spent less than half of what was spent in the public schools, yet had better outcomes. There was little wasted—the money was focused where it mattered.

I suspect that we could have a better education system for less than half of what is spent today (including profit), if the school systems were managed privately. Certainly, it would be better for the state not to have so many direct employees since states have shown that employee cost management is also not a strength.

kmmhike

Proposed funding for full-day kindergarten and preschool amounts to nothing more than taxpayer paid daycare. The only schooling I had before first grade was a partial year of half-day kindergarten and I did just fine, graduating from high school, college (BS), and graduate school (MS Engineering). When my nephews were in kindergarten, their teacher said the only difference between half-day and full-day kindergarten is that the full-day kids stay and play in the afternoon while the half-day kids go home. Five-year olds are just not ready for a full day of academics and that’s fine. Parents need to make their own arrangements for the care of preschool-age kids and kindergartners when they are not in school.

Les Reed

A big problem in schools today stems from having to deal with children who are already damaged by their environment, often by direct and indirect effects of poverty. The school in which I used to work had only one social worker/psychologist. She was hopelessly overwhelmed. The dysfunctions show up in the classroom, where they are disruptive. Since schools are called upon to be partial social service agencies, they should be funded as such.

johnrpack

We’re spending over $12,000/student/year in Douglas County. For that price, our students should graduate from high school with an MD, PhD, or JD.

Instead, scores are slightly lower than they were 30 years ago before we tripled inflation-adjusted spending, and more than 40% of graduates don’t even have basic proficiency at reading, writing, and math.

We certainly cannot afford to trust the current administrators with more money — they have no clue how to improve performance.

MS

This isn’t as much about schools or students as it is about introducing progressive taxation to Colorado and removing any limit on the legislature’s ability to raise taxes further.

steve

Amendment 66 supports are not telling you the whole truth

Read the facts! They
say it only cost $133 which is unrealistic unless your income in near the poverty
level. If you and your spouse make $75K
it will cost you $952/year.

The millions it raises cannot spent wisely in a year and will
only create fraud. Do you want the government
spending more of your income

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